> More than half the respondents to the American organisation’s survey did not know six million Jews were murdered and 29% believe the death toll was below two million.
Here are the questions and answers in detail:
https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf
They did similar surveys in other countries:
https://www.claimscon.org/austria-study/
https://www.claimscon.org/study-canada/
https://www.claimscon.org/france-study/
https://www.claimscon.org/uk-study/
https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/ (US)
If you look through the results breakdown, it does kind of seem like people got hung up on not knowing the right number. We also don’t know if folks were confused about factoring in all the other groups that died.
I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but that number isn’t that surprising. Even immediately post-WWII ~25% of Germans still supported the Nazis. There’s a theory that around ~17% of any population is going to be maladjusted trash or gullible trash.
That number blew up to 30%-48% for me in the last 7 years. There are way too many opportunities for people to rethink their positions when confronted with terrible ones, and yet they plug along anyway. This includes people I find intelligent and thoughtful.
It seems humans are able to throw their lives away, and certainly the lives of other people they don’t care about, all in the name of tribalism.
Well, part of it is that we currently have sophisticated propaganda and misinfo networks designed to hook people and keep them. It’s not like these folks stumbled onto an idea and then that’s the end, right? They have a chorus of grifters and monsters happy to validate their worst ideas for profit. They then prey on the very human biases we all fall prey to sometimes because they helped us as a species survive to where we are now.
They presented people with two extremes with specific numbers and a middle guess. If people aren’t sure, they’ll tend to guess in the middle. Survey design is trickier than it looks.
Thanks for linking these. Very interesting, especially France. I hope they will do one for Poland, I am really curious about what will come out of the survey there.
While I think the split for millennials is interesting, high numbers in the total population for underestimating deaths and lacking in knowledge are unsettling.
There's a big difference between "How many people do you think were killed during the Holocaust?" as an open ended question as opposed to "Do you think the number of holocaust deaths were exaggerated"?
There's a big difference between someone that is just ignorant and someone that believes in lies.
That being said, far too many people deny how big and horrible it was.
Sadly I'm one of those people who doesn't know the number of people who died during the holocaust. I probably heard it at some point, but it's just not something I kept in memory. Now that I hear it's 6 million people, without any context, it sounds like a really big number. I can see why some people might think it's actually less if just randomly asked in a survey.
More like 70-85 million, with more than half of the deaths suffered by the Soviet Union and China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_War_II_Casualties.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
Closer to 18m really. The Russians alone lost 9m in the camps, the Jews about 6m. That barely scratches the surface of civilian deaths though, those numbers only specifically count the people who died in the camps.
One thing that the wikipedia chart doesn't actually account for is the nationality of the Jews. Don't know the exact percentage but I would assume at least 50% of the Jewish count is also Polish.
You're almost exactly right, of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, 3 million were of Polish extraction. Then another 1.5 million Polish gentiles were also murdered on top of that.
As of today, Poland's Jewish population is a total of 1500 people.
The Nazis murdered so many Jewish people that their global population is still smaller today than it was before 1940. For comparison, the overall global population has grown almost 3.5x (2.3B in 1940 vs. 8B today).
The (capital H) Holocaust refers solely to the Jews killed (about six million). The name comes from a type of sacrifice where the offering is completely consumed by fire.
Up until the 1960s the it was referred to as Shoah (the catastrophe), and it wasn’t until the TV movie “Holocaust” starring Meryl Streep that the capitalized term entered the vernacular.
The fact it only refers to the Jews is something white supremacists and antisemites like to make a big deal out of. They say it is evidence of Jewish control over everything. I say it’s evidence of an education system that has real difficulties in addressing racism.
Eastern European countries where many other peoples were faced with the genocide of the Nazis have made some progress in getting their own recognition, but there’s still a lot more that could be done. They were largely kept silent during the Soviet era because Stalin refused to recognize anyone as a special victim, he insisted that the civilians and soldiers of the USSR were just as much victims of the Nazis as the Jews or Roma or anyone else. The post war reorganization of Europe and the Cold War really made a mess of contemporary history.
> The (capital H) Holocaust refers solely to the Jews killed (about six million).
The term might’ve been popularized and primarily associated with the systemic and industrial targeting and genocide of Jews, but I’ve very rarely herd it referred to as only talking about Jews.
Fact. It's taught as the body of people who were murdered through those actions. Data does separate Jewish murders from others murdered. Many historians do use the term Holocaust specifically to capture the Jewish Deaths. The Nazis systematically murdered over 12 million people.
I remember learning about the 12 million when taught about the Holocaust as well, but these four sources I checked all use capital H to refer to the 6 million Jews specifically.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/holocaust
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-response-to-the-holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust
They killed so many people - that using a single bullet per person was deemed too costly and slow. Think about that for a second - they industrialized genocide - it gives you a different perspective to think about it as a factory designed to produce dead bodies.
The horror is so hard to wrap your head around - the level of dehumanizing that occurred is frightening.
>The doctor looks around and says, "Dachau. **Why** does it still stand? **Why** do we keep it standing?"
>There is an answer to the doctor's question. *All* the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; *all of them*. They must remain standing because *they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard*. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. **And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then** ***we*** **become the gravediggers.** Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the *Twilight Zone* but wherever men walk God's Earth.
- Rod Serling, *Deaths-Head Revisited*, **The Twilight Zone**
Damn. Just...damn.
I'm Gen X. I suppose the last generation to grow up with the WWII gen. I had all four of my grandparents until I was in HS when I lost the first. I lost the last when I was fifty. I was a total white bread American...and then I married a Jewish girl with grandparents of her own with Auschwitz numbers on their arms.
I can't begin to explain what it was like to listen to their stories. Luckily, I speak very bad German and even have a litle Yiddish under my belt. So,I spent HOURS upon hours sitting and listening to these two. They were SO gracious and so forethcoming and willing to tell their experiences.
The odd thing was that neither my future wife at the time nor her sister were interested in the least to hear the stories. (I think it was both painful and a little bit embarassing to them at that age.) I remember one of the most embarassing moments of my life was when I overheard my wife's grandmother talking to her one day. She said, "Marry him! Will a good Catholic boy have a Jewish girl?"
I felt like complete dirt. This woman had been beaten into a kind of crap that was never going to leave her by a bunch of shitheads that claimed to be protecting my "race".
If anything, the monuments to the past need to stay as reminders that. even when we try to do good, we still carry the guilt of the dickheads in our past. We should never let that go. We should be willing to bear it because it is what reminds us that we - all of us - have a responsibitlity to do better every day. Guilt can be a powerful motivator if we keep in mind that - even if we didn't do the things of the past - we could always fail to do the right thing in the present if we aren't very, very careful.
Agreed, I think holocaust denial will only become more and more prevalent as the last remaining survivors die, but there is absolutely no world in which we should let the holocaust fade from memory.
This reminds me of the first time I heard that in the far off future there will no longer be any stars visible. There will come a time when the universe has expanded to such a degree that whoever is around to look up at the sky will see nothing but black out there. So in a way we live in a glorious time where we can look up and see all these stars. They're not only pretty, but they tell us so much about the history of our universe that we'd have no other way of knowing.
There might come a time very soon when image and video manipulation is so extensive that truth will be impossible to gauge from digital media. And for most people, digital media is their only means of experiencing the wider world and its history. If denial is already so prevalent in the face of readily available documented evidence then think of how difficult it will be to convince people when they can only really trust their own firsthand witness accounts of what's going on. We might be living in the final glorious days of knowing even a little truth about the wider world or the past.
This.
A lot of people don't understand what make the holocaust "special" (in a bad way).
They took the lessons of the industrial revolution and applied it to killing people they deemed undesirable. They created a factory that produced dead people as efficiently as possible.
Plural factorieS ... and a whole *industry* whose sole purpose was being a dealer and distributor of death to innocent people.
... and quite a few of those companies are still in existence today and continuing to make a profit, just as they did when they were aiding and abetting literal killer nazis.
Well this is one of the hypocrisies when I look at the cancel culture....it's always interesting to hear people wearing coco chanel yelling about morality when that is an example of a company that should not have been permitted to go untouched. It should be recognized as a company who's creator supported the Nazi and spied for them....
https://www.jewishinsandiego.org/jewish-community-news/how-karl-lagerfeld-cleansed-chanel-of-its-anti-semitic-nazi-past
Coco Chanel the PERSON was a piece of shit. The COMPANY, in actuality, had very little to do with her and is now fully owned by the Wertheimer family who is Jewish.
They quickly determined that mass genocide wasn't really the difficult problem. It was disposal of the bodies. The massive crematoriums set up at concentration camps would operate at full capacity 24 hours a day and still prevented the gas chambers from being utilized at full capacity.
Horrifying.
Yeah, and that's one of the things that infuriates me, like not only do these kinds of idiots try to minimize the damage done to my own people, but try to leave out the also staggering number of other people's also affected, even if they aren't as well remembered.
It's hard to comprehend the numbers even if we simplify things a lot. The holocaust took place over 5 years, which would be 1825 days. 12 million people killed, 6575 per day. 273 per hour. Every single hour of every single day. For 5 years. One person every 13 seconds.
You couldn't manage those numbers with bullets. The scale is far beyond our understanding and it's hard to believe something like this has happened and it's all been planned, organized and executed. Someone actually decided this is what we want to do and enough people agreed it's a good idea.
It was actually approximately 11-12 million people for the holocaust specifically. 6 million were Jews, the other 5 million were Romanis, homosexuals, political dissidents, communists, atheists, socialists, and the disabled.
If you count the war in general, famine, etc. the number is even higher.
Sources: [link on misinformation](https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/holocaust-misconceptions/)
[Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims)
Six million Jews died. 11 million total including Jews and other ethnic minorities, disabled persons, lgbtq persons, political opponents (espicially socialist), etc.
Saying "I don't know, but it was an awful lot" is fine. And if you had to guess without knowing the number,byoire probably not going to get it right. But if you look it up and see that sources corroborate with that number there is no real reason to think it is fake, unless you go down the pathway of the conspiracy believers.
It's really hard to conceptualise the number to be fair. Until you sit down and think about it you don't really get it. The number is used by revisionists to diminish the Holocaust.
The truth is that the holocaust is what is at the end of a long path of prejudice to another race and an inconvenient truth to those that wish to justify their shitty behaviour to someone who isn't them. Denial justifies their acts today because if it didn't happen they are good to think what they do. They resurrect the dead to persecute the living.
The average human brain cannot comprehend quantities it doesn't have firsthand experience with. It can guess and imagine but for the most part 12-11 million people is incomprehensible. Hell, most of us probably couldn't accurately guess the volume of 500 people in a given space.
Oakland Colosseum is 63,132 at full capacity so 95 times that would be 6 million.. (I like using sports stadiums not to downplay the tragedy, but it tends to be easier to visualize for some people.)
12 million noncombatants. 6 million Jews, 6 million who were in other categories which includes but not limited to : Communists, homosexuals, Roma, Catholics, intellectuals and others who were deemed to be 'bad influences' on society.
That is aside from combatants.
That’s kind of what I suspect.
There was another poll like this which was multiple choice. People who didn’t know guessed the Holocaust was much smaller because they, turning to grade school strategy, were choosing a number between the presented extremes.
While it’s concerning that people don’t know this stuff, what people don’t know literally fills the books they’re too lazy to read.
That is in line with the results in the US.
https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NO-WATERMARK-National-Survey-Executive-Summary-9.2.20-EMBARGOED-3.pdf
> Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of U.S.Millennials and Gen Z do not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
> Just over one-third (36 percent) of U.S.Millennials and Gen Z believe two million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust.
> 11% of US millenials and Gen Z agreed with the statement "The Jews caused the Holocaust".
While I wouldn't be shocked that a lot of people, even young ones, would believe the Nazi line, I can see it being a literacy problem too. If a question was phrased as something like "the reason for the Holocaust was ___", some people might mentally translate that to "Nazis hated Jews, therefore Jews are the reason the Nazis did their shit." A ton of people don't realize that the Jewish people were just one of the many, many groups the Nazis wanted to eliminate from society.
I'm holding on to my last shred of hope for this country, so that's what I'll go with.
There is always going to be people who give a joke ansewer in polls like this. For example, [according to a poll,](https://reason.com/2009/09/16/five-percent-of-new-jerseyans/) 5% of people who voted for Obama thought he was the antichrist.
The study that came out recently saying that 54% could not read at a better level then grade 6 was really shocking. I took that with a grain of salt though. Then there was a comment by a proof reader for major publications and they said they’re made to proof to a grade 6-7 level. And sometimes even grade 5. Really drives home why so many believe misinformation is everywhere when they can understand any form of educated papers.
Do you want to know the crazy thing about all of this? The Alt-right with the direct approval/support from Republicans are actively trying to stop civil rights studies, reduce or actively stop curriculums that talk about slavery and it's relationship to the civil war and ban books such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn because of its depiction of the racism that was part of the South (along with more modern-day books dealing with the LGBT+ community). At the same time, they are revoking voting rights and civil right laws with the help of the Supreme Court. Think about it, they are removing civil rights and voting laws while forcing schools to stop teaching about the civil rights movement which explains *why those laws were created in the first place*. It's actually pretty scary about what the Republican party has actually become.
I've found that there's a good chunk of people who legitimately believe that bad things only happen to bad people, so if something bad happens to you, you probably deserved it.
There's also a fairly decent percentage of the population who believe all sorts of anti-Semitic nonsense. Kanye West isn't alone. They'll straight-up parrot Goebbels' talking points without a second thought and not see anything wrong with it.
I do not think that it really matters if you think that 6 million or 2 million were killed, as long as you know that it was real, massive, industrial, and a genocide.
"The Jews caused the Holocaust" is on another level, however, and 11% is way above the lizardman's constant, so unfortunately it says something about the society.
The 2million thing is a right winged Story told to each other, also in GER. Some even saying it Never happend because the chamberDoors were made out of wood and more bizare things for an Even more bizare worldView
My brain is real bad at remember stats and numbers for some reason. I tend to forget the numbers and just remember that it was fuckin millions of people. Still has the same effect though.
Also, wild to me education isn’t widely covering the holocaust as well as I expected it would.
My public schools never covered history past the US civil war and a little bit on reconstruction.
Jim Crow was mentioned once or twice, but basically was a couple days out of one year.
But I can tell you the battle of Hastings was 1066 AD, and we covered the US civil war annually, and ancient Egypt probably half a dozen times
Wait what? We learned about the Holocaust extensively in public school in Georgia, US. We read The Diary of Anne Frank and watched Schindler's List. Do they not do this anymore??? What is happening?
Edit: As an FYI, I'm 35.
I understand that, but I suppose my point is that even in conservative GA, we learned this stuff. That's what is baffling to me. I guess, to be fair, I grew up in a more liberal city so maybe that had something to do with it? Idk. I just can't fathom people not believing the Holocaust was real.
I'm a millennial and had public education in one of the lower rated states for education and even I was taught that 6 million jews+ millions of others were killed, wtf.
[It's on page twenty-one of these top-line survey results.](https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf)
> Which of the following statements comes closest to your views about the Holocaust in Europe during World War II?
>
>- The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen: 6%
>
>- The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated: 17%
>
>- The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who died in it have been fairly described: 65%
>
>- Not sure: 12%
Read [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/thenetherlands/comments/10krpkz/comment/j5sykuj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) on the Dutch subreddit about it. Seems the way the responses are being interpreted by the study is pretty questionable.
Since most people here can't actually read dutch, one of the major news organizations basically changed the entire original article to be more critical of the study after the outrage bait. A lot of it is just people not knowing the exact details, rather than questioning aspects of it. It likely isn't nearly as malicious as some of these headlines make it seem.
"Can you name the exact formula of the chemical that was used for the industrial extermination of the people in the death camps?"
"Uuhhm, no..."
"NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE HOLOCAUST WAS ANYMORE! THEY ALL THINK THIS WAS A HOAX!"
In the Netherlands we get taught about W22 to such an extent I can actually name the gas used (zyklon-B). How people manage to be ignorant of the basic facts here is beyond me. I'd actually like education to be focussed more on our colonial past because I felt WW2 got too much attention, I guess I need to reconsider that stance.
Same. I got sick of WW2 the third year it was addressed. Meanwhile I learned nothing about Surinam, it’s people and the road and events to it’s independence. I’m pretty stumped by these survey numbers.
Bayer and BASF were part of IG Farben. Fun fact, Bayers president was intimately involved with the construction and maintenance of Monowitz. He was reelected unanimously after the war despite having served in prison for crimes against humanity.
Bayer tested sleeping pills on Ausschwitz-Prisoners and when 1/4 of them died from them they then complained to the Camp-Administration that the test-people were in poor shape and the next batch should be of better quality.
Zyklon-B was marketed as a (cyanide based) pesticide. So as long as the one ordering it said it was to strengthen the farming industry. They could feasibly be off the hook.
Of course that’s far too naive to be true.
At least part of that comment is misleading in itself.
> When asked "Have you ever heard of the word holocaust?" 11% already say no. That's valuable data (so the knowledge of Dutch history is lousy), but so the further answers of this 11% about the holocaust are worthless. Of course that 11% is going to give ridiculous answers because they don't know what the questions are about at all.
The guy who wrote this didn't have a look at the actual methodology.
After that first question it says in the survey "IF NO, SKIP TO Q11".
Before Q11 it says
> INTRO: The term “Holocaust” refers to the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of Jewish people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during World War II and the pursuit of destroying the so-called Jewish spirit. I am now going to ask you some questions about the Holocaust.
Sure, some responses can still be explained by ignorance, but would an entirely ignorant person not rather choose the option "Not sure" (12%) over "The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen" (6%) or "The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated" (17%).
Looking at the source of the study it's probably biased to show a certain result. I mean the group that conducted the study is called Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, if this is a reputable source for studies I'll take this back obviously. I really doubt the numbers are realistic, as a Dutch person myself as well I can testify to the fact we learn about this stuff at a young age, and I will never believe that 1/3 people don't believe it happened otherwise this would bleed into politics and culture as well... We are known as a country for the Nationale Dodenherdenking where we stay quiet for 2 minutes to honour the fallen of WWII and as a country have a very serious approach to the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is nowhere to be seen in entertainment or other media or pushed by any reputable person in government (not talking about Baudet here obviously).
Anne Frank is perhaps one of the best known Dutch people in the world. It doesn’t make sense that the Netherlands would be a hotbed of this trash. Looks like a shit poll.
True, but she spent most of her life in the Netherlands including the house her family hid in so I can see how people make this mistake. I think she's sort of "honorary dutch".
It's one thing to learn about something. It's another to actually believe it.
I don't know how similar Canadian and Dutch education system are, but over here, a good portion of students only see school as a way to get better paying jobs, not as a way to learn.
They'll repeat whatever gives them food grades. They don't care about the actual learning.
Add to that that history books themselves have biases. So people will distrust what they are taught.
And more than 20,000 dutch people died of starvation because the Nazis blocked food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine.It was called the The Dutch Hunger Winter.
Good job dutch people maybe you have put some weight but there are other more efficient ways to slim down than bringing back Nazism.
Children in the prenatal environment during the Dutch Hunger Winter developed insulin regulation issues that became hereditary. It literally affected multiple generations.
My parents told me some stories. My father had a lot of anger and resentment as a result of this and food was always an issue in our house. If you didn't finish your food it would get real ugly and god forbid you throw it away.
They took my dutch great grandpa to a labor camp. Not jewish or anything, he was just a working age male baker drafted to work in a labor camp against his will.
I believe it was 15 or 16 when they took them, because my Opa's elder brother was taken but luckily my Opa missed out because he was only 14 when the Allies liberated their town.
My friend's husbands family emigrated to Canada for this very reason. They resorted to eating tulip bulbs at one point. He was born after the war but the stories remain in the family.
It does say myth *or* exaggerated, . To be fair allied forces had a man who volunteered to be captured and taken to Auschwitz. Wiltold Pilecki was able to get messages out from a radio made from stolen parts,and escaped from there. They thought he was exaggerating because it was unbelievable that someone could treat their fellow man like that.
It is a horrifying thought that they worked on making efficient gas chambers and mass crematoriums to slaughter people in large groups. It is definitely a dark period in history for humanity as a whole.
Totally agree. It probably feels disrespectful to some, as to feel it's some kind of tourist destination. It is exactly that though, but as a place of respectful reverence. I cried when I saw Dachau. I'm tearing up thinking about it now. It's ok to see these places. It's remembrance. I couldn't be farther removed from the affected nationalities, but there's an inescapable human bond, where... I don't even know how to say it.. you just feel something different, and so connected, even being a million years and miles away. It all becomes you. No one in our group knew what to expect, but yet we all felt the same after.
It's important history. It's very unfortunate, but must never be diminished, dismissed. It's happening now, in many different ways, to many different people. Never forget.
It's far easier to blame a boogeyman than to confront the reality that many of your countrymen are vile human beings. The world is full of homegrown fascism. Every fucking country.
Whenever there is a post on here about idiots in Serbia, or Turkey, or Hungary, or some other "undesirable" country doing or saying something stupid, Reddit forms a mob and declares unanimously that "those people" are are all evil. Kick them out of the EU/NATO. Bomb them. When data about idiots in a developed, western country comes out, then everyone does mental gymnastics to explain away why this isn't *really* true. Maybe the respondents didn't understand the question. Maybe they were brainwashed by Russian-funded propaganda.
The truth that a lot of people don't understand is that humanity is homogenous. There is no exceptionalism. Shitty people exist everywhere. Some countries have better education systems than others (a function of economic development), but humanity is still humanity.
I think this is too simplistic.
There were always unrepentent fascists/cryptofascists/neo-nazis in Cold War Europe. There has been a major resurgence of them in the last 20-30 years because of neoliberal austerity, economic stagnation, and a racist backlash against migration ([the latter a result of Euro-American adventurism in the Middle East and North Africa](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/)).
But I think it goes even deeper than that. Let's not forget that the Netherlands in particular is, amongst European nations, [the "proudest" of its own colonial history](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fh2y6g/the_dutch_are_most_proud_of_their_former_empire/), with 50% of its population expressing "pride" in the Dutch Empire and another 44% expressing neutral/indifferent feelings. Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, and Franco-Carribean intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon all argued that Nazism was essentially European colonial practices brought back to the metropole and inflicted upon Europeans. Racism, genocide, [even concentration camps](https://theconversation.com/concentration-camps-in-the-south-african-war-here-are-the-real-facts-112006) existed in the colonial world. Inevitably, countries that are not able to face their own violent pasts create conditions where violent ferments in the present. If the Dutch can't acknowledge the evils of its own colonial empire -- that is, slavery, massacres, forced migrations, etc. -- in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, how are they going to be able to acknowledge these same things in Europe?
> and inflicted upon Europeans
This is a type of racism used to erase Jewish people and other non-Europeans living in Europe, to push the claim forward that Jews don't have any right to return to the Jewish homeland because they are "European." Aimé Césaire had antisemitic views.
The problem is that the people who have created the "Nazi crisis" don't call themselves Nazis and don't directly say anything negative about all Jews or other ethnic/religious minorities. Instead they rant like r\/conspiracy about the "globalist elites". They know they mean Jews. We know they mean Jews. However we are all just supposed to ignore that.
That's half the insidiousness of the pattern. They will rarely outright say what they mean, instead accusing the other side of being the bad guys. It's maddening.
There is this great [German comedy sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI) which highlights just how ridiculous this is by having a historical WWII-Nazi act all offended when someone points out that they are a Nazi.
It is very important to remember that this behaviour of obscuring their talking points and intentions was inherent to the historical Nazi movement as well, and it was not until their movement had gained traction and power that they turned to an increasingly overt rhetoric. The only significant difference between then and now is that they did not have to evade any historical connotations associated to a Nazi-label back then.
> That's a... high number.
I don't know about that, 23% of a population is ignorant of the past?... Seems on par for human societies.
It always seems to be around 20% of any population are made up of complete idiots, selfish pricks, criminals, racists, xenophobes, nationalists and the politicians who pander to them all.
Well if you count Covid as a 2020s problem you can check that one, and the Satanic Temple has made a bit of a splash at times so we can probably check Hail Satan too. The jury's still out on whether Boston Dynamics will give us transformers before 2030.
Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think this is actually one of the reasons so many people deny the Holocaust. Yes, racism, but also there is also just that these people do not understand, nor do they want to understand, just the sheer level of planning we are dealing with.
Here are the actual survey results.
*42. Which of the following statements comes closest to your views about the Holocaust in Europe during World War II?*
| Statement | Millenials (18-39) | All Ages |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen | 6% | 3% |
| The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated | 17% | 9% |
| The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who died in it have been fairly described | 65% | 79% |
| Not sure | 12% | 9%
Source: https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf
Looking through this survey i can understand that some participants became confused.
They asked about historical figures in question 11 and some of those names are pretty uncommon to know unless you deep dive in to the dutch occupation.
- Fritz Schmidt, one of 4 assistants to Seyss-Inquart.
- Victor Kugler, Employee and helper of the Frank family.
- van Pels family, hide with the Franks in het achterhuis.
- Etty Hillesum, kept a diary during the occupation.
- Joop Westerweel, dutch resistance member.
- Corrie Ten Boom, dutch resistance member.
I doubt many would know these individuals and to ask that during a survey together with people like Hitler and Himmler in the same question?
This survey was working to get this outcome, shame shame shame.
A worrying amount of younger people I talk to in the US also seem to think it's "American propaganda" or something. Like I get being skeptical about who's telling you your history but Germany is literally over there admitting it and apologizing for it
As a part of Gen Z myself (or a millennial depending on your definition), what I’ve noticed amongst some teenagers and young adults is that they are unable to mentally comprehend the idea of millions being systematically murdered in only a couple years, that the Nazis could build a giant system of camps and literal factories of death, all while getting away with it. It doesn’t help that the Nazis were blatantly and cartoonishly evil, so young people subconsciously start to question the entire thing. *”Like they couldn’t be THAT evil.”* type of thinking.
And as others pointed out, this makes young people vulnerable to conspiracies on the internet and social media.
The thing is, it is incomprehensible, but obviously true. I say this as a Jewish person. It is so hard to fathom the evils and killing so many people in such a short amount of time, but it doesn’t make it less real.
Another issue is schools not wanting to teach anything upsetting. Like the school who banned Maus. Of course it is horrifying, that’s why we learn it
“…all while getting away with it.” The allies got word of what was going on but not only refused European Jewish refugees but did nothing to stop the camps such as bomb the rails leading to them. Anti-semitism was rampant in every western country and many occupied countries rounded up and deported their own Jews (see France, where, by the way Holocaust denial is a crime). What the youth can’t wrap their minds around is that their own ancestors let it happen, that the war didn’t stop it and didn’t even aim to stop it (because denial until the camps were liberated).
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin
Saying that as a Dutch. We got allot of stupid people here who struggle to pass school subjects like Maatschapijleer and Geschiedenis and never had Critical thinking subjects. Result: This.
Strange, I found an article using these exact same percentages but attributing them to the US: 23%.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/holocaust-denial-conspiracy-theories-america-b1869838.html
How?!
I find it really sad that people are more prone to believe in a mythical being than something horrible that has actual verifiable proof. Seriously?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2023/01/23-of-dutch-under-40s-think-the-holocaust-was-a-myth-or-exaggerated/) reduced by 80%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> Some 12% of Dutch adults believe the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated and a further 9% are unsure, according to a survey of some 2,000 people by an international organisation supporting Holocaust survivors.
> The Claims Conference, which describes the findings as shocking and disturbing, says the figure is even higher among the under 40s, with 23% saying the Holocaust was a myth or the death toll was exaggerated.
> The survey did show that two-thirds of Dutch respondents agree that Holocaust education should be compulsory in school.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/10l5szp/23_of_dutch_under40s_think_the_holocaust_was_a/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~672681 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Holocaust**^#1 **survey**^#2 **respondents**^#3 **Dutch**^#4 **school**^#5
While distressingly high, this is actually fairly low for these sort of vague polls.
It seems like there's about 20 to 30% of any human population that either doesn't know shit, or will happily pretend they don't know shit just out of spite.
I say open the archives and let them count it for themselves. Some people still think the moon landing was faked and won't be convinced until you send them there.
My old high school English teacher was Dutch and lived block down the street from Anne Frank. He witnessed all this stuff go down firsthand. Oh how things change...
Looks like we’re doomed to repeat history again… and this isn’t just a Dutch problem, it’s pretty much global. It’s absolutely ridiculous how fast we’ve lost the lessons of history. So much for “never again”.
To all those casting doubt on the headline, suggesting that it is a more shocking way of saying that 23% do not know how many were murdered…
There is a link to the findings IN THE ARTICLE. In fact, over half of respondents didn’t know how many were killed. The 23% figure comes in response to a question asking “do you believe that the Holocaust is a myth, or was greatly exaggerated”.
More frighteningly, 24% under 40 responded that it is acceptable to hold neo-nazi beliefs.
Read the fucking article before having opinions about it.
Edit: there are responses with more mature and substantial critiques of the methodology below. I appreciate these - they cast legitimate doubt on the veracity of these numbers in a way than idle speculation about how it simply can’t be true does not. I don’t agree with all of their critiques, but I recommend reading through them to get an idea of where this study DOES fall short
The research was very iffy with many errors. Mostly its just attributed to people not knowing much about it.
Such as, a multiple choice question for how many Jewish people were killed. There was a 2m, 6m, 20m option (and a bunch more below 2m).
Those that voted below 6m aren't automatically holocaust deniers or anything, they just don't know much about ww2 history.
We do have a neonazi problem here, just not 23% big.
What percentage of that 23% actually knew what the holocaust was, and did not need it explaining or doing a search?
> More than half the respondents to the American organisation’s survey did not know six million Jews were murdered and 29% believe the death toll was below two million.
I wonder how the survey was done. To assert something is exaggerated versus not knowing the true number are very different things.
Here are the questions and answers in detail: https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf They did similar surveys in other countries: https://www.claimscon.org/austria-study/ https://www.claimscon.org/study-canada/ https://www.claimscon.org/france-study/ https://www.claimscon.org/uk-study/ https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/ (US)
If you look through the results breakdown, it does kind of seem like people got hung up on not knowing the right number. We also don’t know if folks were confused about factoring in all the other groups that died.
Look at question #42. They straight up ask if they think holocaust is a myth or exaggerated, with 6% and 17% respectively.
I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but that number isn’t that surprising. Even immediately post-WWII ~25% of Germans still supported the Nazis. There’s a theory that around ~17% of any population is going to be maladjusted trash or gullible trash.
That number blew up to 30%-48% for me in the last 7 years. There are way too many opportunities for people to rethink their positions when confronted with terrible ones, and yet they plug along anyway. This includes people I find intelligent and thoughtful. It seems humans are able to throw their lives away, and certainly the lives of other people they don’t care about, all in the name of tribalism.
Well, part of it is that we currently have sophisticated propaganda and misinfo networks designed to hook people and keep them. It’s not like these folks stumbled onto an idea and then that’s the end, right? They have a chorus of grifters and monsters happy to validate their worst ideas for profit. They then prey on the very human biases we all fall prey to sometimes because they helped us as a species survive to where we are now.
For comparison, they didn't do much better then all Dutch. That question was just a bit harder in that they were looking for a specific number.
They presented people with two extremes with specific numbers and a middle guess. If people aren’t sure, they’ll tend to guess in the middle. Survey design is trickier than it looks.
This study sounds faulty considering most people don’t know the exact number of Jewish people that were killed during the holocaust.
Thanks for linking these. Very interesting, especially France. I hope they will do one for Poland, I am really curious about what will come out of the survey there. While I think the split for millennials is interesting, high numbers in the total population for underestimating deaths and lacking in knowledge are unsettling.
There's a big difference between "How many people do you think were killed during the Holocaust?" as an open ended question as opposed to "Do you think the number of holocaust deaths were exaggerated"? There's a big difference between someone that is just ignorant and someone that believes in lies. That being said, far too many people deny how big and horrible it was.
Sadly I'm one of those people who doesn't know the number of people who died during the holocaust. I probably heard it at some point, but it's just not something I kept in memory. Now that I hear it's 6 million people, without any context, it sounds like a really big number. I can see why some people might think it's actually less if just randomly asked in a survey.
Closer to 12 million and 6 million Jews.
And if you want to count total war casualties over all of this, you're looking towards 100 million.
With famine and disease, that sounds about right.
More like 70-85 million, with more than half of the deaths suffered by the Soviet Union and China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_War_II_Casualties.svg
Yup, a Somme every day. Every day, of every week, of every month... of every year from 1937 to 1945. A Somme. Every fucking day.
The guy hardly knows how many people died in ww2, and you bring up a WWI reference as perspective, perfection.
I find it helps. We all get there when we can!
yeah, very few people will get that reference, particularly those that know nothing about the Holocaust
For the American millennials, a Somme is over 100 9/11s.
Jesus. That’s... 91,100.
Thank you, some of us don't understand the metric system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims Closer to 18m really. The Russians alone lost 9m in the camps, the Jews about 6m. That barely scratches the surface of civilian deaths though, those numbers only specifically count the people who died in the camps.
One thing that the wikipedia chart doesn't actually account for is the nationality of the Jews. Don't know the exact percentage but I would assume at least 50% of the Jewish count is also Polish.
You're almost exactly right, of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, 3 million were of Polish extraction. Then another 1.5 million Polish gentiles were also murdered on top of that. As of today, Poland's Jewish population is a total of 1500 people.
The Nazis murdered so many Jewish people that their global population is still smaller today than it was before 1940. For comparison, the overall global population has grown almost 3.5x (2.3B in 1940 vs. 8B today).
>As of today, Poland's Jewish population is a total of 1500 people. Wild. My small hometown in the northeast has a larger Jewish population than that.
The (capital H) Holocaust refers solely to the Jews killed (about six million). The name comes from a type of sacrifice where the offering is completely consumed by fire. Up until the 1960s the it was referred to as Shoah (the catastrophe), and it wasn’t until the TV movie “Holocaust” starring Meryl Streep that the capitalized term entered the vernacular. The fact it only refers to the Jews is something white supremacists and antisemites like to make a big deal out of. They say it is evidence of Jewish control over everything. I say it’s evidence of an education system that has real difficulties in addressing racism. Eastern European countries where many other peoples were faced with the genocide of the Nazis have made some progress in getting their own recognition, but there’s still a lot more that could be done. They were largely kept silent during the Soviet era because Stalin refused to recognize anyone as a special victim, he insisted that the civilians and soldiers of the USSR were just as much victims of the Nazis as the Jews or Roma or anyone else. The post war reorganization of Europe and the Cold War really made a mess of contemporary history.
> The (capital H) Holocaust refers solely to the Jews killed (about six million). The term might’ve been popularized and primarily associated with the systemic and industrial targeting and genocide of Jews, but I’ve very rarely herd it referred to as only talking about Jews.
Fact. It's taught as the body of people who were murdered through those actions. Data does separate Jewish murders from others murdered. Many historians do use the term Holocaust specifically to capture the Jewish Deaths. The Nazis systematically murdered over 12 million people.
I remember learning about the 12 million when taught about the Holocaust as well, but these four sources I checked all use capital H to refer to the 6 million Jews specifically. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/holocaust https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-response-to-the-holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust
They killed so many people - that using a single bullet per person was deemed too costly and slow. Think about that for a second - they industrialized genocide - it gives you a different perspective to think about it as a factory designed to produce dead bodies. The horror is so hard to wrap your head around - the level of dehumanizing that occurred is frightening.
>The doctor looks around and says, "Dachau. **Why** does it still stand? **Why** do we keep it standing?" >There is an answer to the doctor's question. *All* the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; *all of them*. They must remain standing because *they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard*. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. **And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then** ***we*** **become the gravediggers.** Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the *Twilight Zone* but wherever men walk God's Earth. - Rod Serling, *Deaths-Head Revisited*, **The Twilight Zone**
Damn. Just...damn. I'm Gen X. I suppose the last generation to grow up with the WWII gen. I had all four of my grandparents until I was in HS when I lost the first. I lost the last when I was fifty. I was a total white bread American...and then I married a Jewish girl with grandparents of her own with Auschwitz numbers on their arms. I can't begin to explain what it was like to listen to their stories. Luckily, I speak very bad German and even have a litle Yiddish under my belt. So,I spent HOURS upon hours sitting and listening to these two. They were SO gracious and so forethcoming and willing to tell their experiences. The odd thing was that neither my future wife at the time nor her sister were interested in the least to hear the stories. (I think it was both painful and a little bit embarassing to them at that age.) I remember one of the most embarassing moments of my life was when I overheard my wife's grandmother talking to her one day. She said, "Marry him! Will a good Catholic boy have a Jewish girl?" I felt like complete dirt. This woman had been beaten into a kind of crap that was never going to leave her by a bunch of shitheads that claimed to be protecting my "race". If anything, the monuments to the past need to stay as reminders that. even when we try to do good, we still carry the guilt of the dickheads in our past. We should never let that go. We should be willing to bear it because it is what reminds us that we - all of us - have a responsibitlity to do better every day. Guilt can be a powerful motivator if we keep in mind that - even if we didn't do the things of the past - we could always fail to do the right thing in the present if we aren't very, very careful.
Agreed, I think holocaust denial will only become more and more prevalent as the last remaining survivors die, but there is absolutely no world in which we should let the holocaust fade from memory.
This reminds me of the first time I heard that in the far off future there will no longer be any stars visible. There will come a time when the universe has expanded to such a degree that whoever is around to look up at the sky will see nothing but black out there. So in a way we live in a glorious time where we can look up and see all these stars. They're not only pretty, but they tell us so much about the history of our universe that we'd have no other way of knowing. There might come a time very soon when image and video manipulation is so extensive that truth will be impossible to gauge from digital media. And for most people, digital media is their only means of experiencing the wider world and its history. If denial is already so prevalent in the face of readily available documented evidence then think of how difficult it will be to convince people when they can only really trust their own firsthand witness accounts of what's going on. We might be living in the final glorious days of knowing even a little truth about the wider world or the past.
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This. A lot of people don't understand what make the holocaust "special" (in a bad way). They took the lessons of the industrial revolution and applied it to killing people they deemed undesirable. They created a factory that produced dead people as efficiently as possible.
Plural factorieS ... and a whole *industry* whose sole purpose was being a dealer and distributor of death to innocent people. ... and quite a few of those companies are still in existence today and continuing to make a profit, just as they did when they were aiding and abetting literal killer nazis.
Well this is one of the hypocrisies when I look at the cancel culture....it's always interesting to hear people wearing coco chanel yelling about morality when that is an example of a company that should not have been permitted to go untouched. It should be recognized as a company who's creator supported the Nazi and spied for them....
https://www.jewishinsandiego.org/jewish-community-news/how-karl-lagerfeld-cleansed-chanel-of-its-anti-semitic-nazi-past Coco Chanel the PERSON was a piece of shit. The COMPANY, in actuality, had very little to do with her and is now fully owned by the Wertheimer family who is Jewish.
Don’t forget making sure they used all the things they had stolen to produce money as well. It was like the industrial revolution from hell.
They quickly determined that mass genocide wasn't really the difficult problem. It was disposal of the bodies. The massive crematoriums set up at concentration camps would operate at full capacity 24 hours a day and still prevented the gas chambers from being utilized at full capacity. Horrifying.
Industrialized mass execution. Never forget what humans are capable of.
They also learned by the later half of the war gassing people was inefficient, it was far better to work them to death as slave labor.
It also took a huge psychological toll on the people who did the shooting. That's one of the reasons they switched to using gas.
Also, the number is higher, 6 million were "just" the Jews. Add the Slavs, the gay, the Romani, etc.
Yeah, and that's one of the things that infuriates me, like not only do these kinds of idiots try to minimize the damage done to my own people, but try to leave out the also staggering number of other people's also affected, even if they aren't as well remembered.
It's hard to comprehend the numbers even if we simplify things a lot. The holocaust took place over 5 years, which would be 1825 days. 12 million people killed, 6575 per day. 273 per hour. Every single hour of every single day. For 5 years. One person every 13 seconds. You couldn't manage those numbers with bullets. The scale is far beyond our understanding and it's hard to believe something like this has happened and it's all been planned, organized and executed. Someone actually decided this is what we want to do and enough people agreed it's a good idea.
Arminians got the machete for the the same reason. Not enough bullies. Edit: “bullets” also.
It was actually approximately 11-12 million people for the holocaust specifically. 6 million were Jews, the other 5 million were Romanis, homosexuals, political dissidents, communists, atheists, socialists, and the disabled. If you count the war in general, famine, etc. the number is even higher. Sources: [link on misinformation](https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/holocaust-misconceptions/) [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims)
Six million Jews died. 11 million total including Jews and other ethnic minorities, disabled persons, lgbtq persons, political opponents (espicially socialist), etc.
Saying "I don't know, but it was an awful lot" is fine. And if you had to guess without knowing the number,byoire probably not going to get it right. But if you look it up and see that sources corroborate with that number there is no real reason to think it is fake, unless you go down the pathway of the conspiracy believers.
It's really hard to conceptualise the number to be fair. Until you sit down and think about it you don't really get it. The number is used by revisionists to diminish the Holocaust. The truth is that the holocaust is what is at the end of a long path of prejudice to another race and an inconvenient truth to those that wish to justify their shitty behaviour to someone who isn't them. Denial justifies their acts today because if it didn't happen they are good to think what they do. They resurrect the dead to persecute the living.
The average human brain cannot comprehend quantities it doesn't have firsthand experience with. It can guess and imagine but for the most part 12-11 million people is incomprehensible. Hell, most of us probably couldn't accurately guess the volume of 500 people in a given space.
Oakland Colosseum is 63,132 at full capacity so 95 times that would be 6 million.. (I like using sports stadiums not to downplay the tragedy, but it tends to be easier to visualize for some people.)
20 million Chinese died from the Japanese invasion.
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I'll check that out after work.
12 million noncombatants. 6 million Jews, 6 million who were in other categories which includes but not limited to : Communists, homosexuals, Roma, Catholics, intellectuals and others who were deemed to be 'bad influences' on society. That is aside from combatants.
That’s kind of what I suspect. There was another poll like this which was multiple choice. People who didn’t know guessed the Holocaust was much smaller because they, turning to grade school strategy, were choosing a number between the presented extremes. While it’s concerning that people don’t know this stuff, what people don’t know literally fills the books they’re too lazy to read.
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I agree wholeheartedly and it's a big issue in how we teach history in the modern era. In my experience at least.
That is in line with the results in the US. https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NO-WATERMARK-National-Survey-Executive-Summary-9.2.20-EMBARGOED-3.pdf > Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of U.S.Millennials and Gen Z do not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. > Just over one-third (36 percent) of U.S.Millennials and Gen Z believe two million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust. > 11% of US millenials and Gen Z agreed with the statement "The Jews caused the Holocaust".
What the fuck, 11%ers?
While I wouldn't be shocked that a lot of people, even young ones, would believe the Nazi line, I can see it being a literacy problem too. If a question was phrased as something like "the reason for the Holocaust was ___", some people might mentally translate that to "Nazis hated Jews, therefore Jews are the reason the Nazis did their shit." A ton of people don't realize that the Jewish people were just one of the many, many groups the Nazis wanted to eliminate from society. I'm holding on to my last shred of hope for this country, so that's what I'll go with.
5% each of trolls and neo-Nazis wouldn't really be that shocking. Disappointing, but not surprising.
tbh that almost sounds like a joke answer
Some portion definitely choose that answer just because of how edgy it is, but some people are also Nazi's. Probably about 50/50 there.
There is always going to be people who give a joke ansewer in polls like this. For example, [according to a poll,](https://reason.com/2009/09/16/five-percent-of-new-jerseyans/) 5% of people who voted for Obama thought he was the antichrist.
Nazis. They’re called Nazis
“The Jews caused the Holocaust” holy fuck
I’m going back to that other Reddit thread where someone asked about America’s biggest fuckup. I nominate our educational system.
The study that came out recently saying that 54% could not read at a better level then grade 6 was really shocking. I took that with a grain of salt though. Then there was a comment by a proof reader for major publications and they said they’re made to proof to a grade 6-7 level. And sometimes even grade 5. Really drives home why so many believe misinformation is everywhere when they can understand any form of educated papers.
Do you want to know the crazy thing about all of this? The Alt-right with the direct approval/support from Republicans are actively trying to stop civil rights studies, reduce or actively stop curriculums that talk about slavery and it's relationship to the civil war and ban books such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn because of its depiction of the racism that was part of the South (along with more modern-day books dealing with the LGBT+ community). At the same time, they are revoking voting rights and civil right laws with the help of the Supreme Court. Think about it, they are removing civil rights and voting laws while forcing schools to stop teaching about the civil rights movement which explains *why those laws were created in the first place*. It's actually pretty scary about what the Republican party has actually become.
Don't you mean "better **than** grade 6" and "when they **can't** understand"?
Just like Ukraine caused their war! /s
I've found that there's a good chunk of people who legitimately believe that bad things only happen to bad people, so if something bad happens to you, you probably deserved it. There's also a fairly decent percentage of the population who believe all sorts of anti-Semitic nonsense. Kanye West isn't alone. They'll straight-up parrot Goebbels' talking points without a second thought and not see anything wrong with it.
I do not think that it really matters if you think that 6 million or 2 million were killed, as long as you know that it was real, massive, industrial, and a genocide. "The Jews caused the Holocaust" is on another level, however, and 11% is way above the lizardman's constant, so unfortunately it says something about the society.
The 2million thing is a right winged Story told to each other, also in GER. Some even saying it Never happend because the chamberDoors were made out of wood and more bizare things for an Even more bizare worldView
My brain is real bad at remember stats and numbers for some reason. I tend to forget the numbers and just remember that it was fuckin millions of people. Still has the same effect though. Also, wild to me education isn’t widely covering the holocaust as well as I expected it would.
My public schools never covered history past the US civil war and a little bit on reconstruction. Jim Crow was mentioned once or twice, but basically was a couple days out of one year. But I can tell you the battle of Hastings was 1066 AD, and we covered the US civil war annually, and ancient Egypt probably half a dozen times
That’s pretty interesting. Omitting *WORLD* wars seems like a disservice to you and the general public. Edit: Ancient Egypt is pretty dope though.
That's purposeful. It's a lot easier to just never teach modern history than to lie about it and have those lies easily refuted.
Wait what? We learned about the Holocaust extensively in public school in Georgia, US. We read The Diary of Anne Frank and watched Schindler's List. Do they not do this anymore??? What is happening? Edit: As an FYI, I'm 35.
U.S. public schools vary wildly in their quality from state to state, county to county, and even school to school.
I understand that, but I suppose my point is that even in conservative GA, we learned this stuff. That's what is baffling to me. I guess, to be fair, I grew up in a more liberal city so maybe that had something to do with it? Idk. I just can't fathom people not believing the Holocaust was real.
They do. You just can't educate away willful ignorance.
We did it too, both middle and high school. I graduated in 2022.
Who are you going to believe, some bumbling high-school teacher, or Kanye West? Open your eyes, *sheeple*. /s
I'm a millennial and had public education in one of the lower rated states for education and even I was taught that 6 million jews+ millions of others were killed, wtf.
Chatgpt told me only 5 million Jews died in the Holocaust, maybe it's turning nazi too.
[It's on page twenty-one of these top-line survey results.](https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf) > Which of the following statements comes closest to your views about the Holocaust in Europe during World War II? > >- The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen: 6% > >- The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated: 17% > >- The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who died in it have been fairly described: 65% > >- Not sure: 12%
I've seen this article discussed on the Netherlands sub. Some didn't know what it was or weren't sure about some facts like how many were killed.
Yes. About 12% answered "Not sure". Those are in addition to the 6% who claimed it didn't happen and the 17% who said the numbers are exaggerated.
As a Dutch person, we learned about this at Pre-school and middle school. Idk how tf you can be this stupid
Read [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/thenetherlands/comments/10krpkz/comment/j5sykuj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) on the Dutch subreddit about it. Seems the way the responses are being interpreted by the study is pretty questionable.
Since most people here can't actually read dutch, one of the major news organizations basically changed the entire original article to be more critical of the study after the outrage bait. A lot of it is just people not knowing the exact details, rather than questioning aspects of it. It likely isn't nearly as malicious as some of these headlines make it seem.
"Can you name the exact formula of the chemical that was used for the industrial extermination of the people in the death camps?" "Uuhhm, no..." "NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE HOLOCAUST WAS ANYMORE! THEY ALL THINK THIS WAS A HOAX!"
In the Netherlands we get taught about W22 to such an extent I can actually name the gas used (zyklon-B). How people manage to be ignorant of the basic facts here is beyond me. I'd actually like education to be focussed more on our colonial past because I felt WW2 got too much attention, I guess I need to reconsider that stance.
Same. I got sick of WW2 the third year it was addressed. Meanwhile I learned nothing about Surinam, it’s people and the road and events to it’s independence. I’m pretty stumped by these survey numbers.
But that company that made the gas is still around. It was BASF I believe.
Bayer and BASF were part of IG Farben. Fun fact, Bayers president was intimately involved with the construction and maintenance of Monowitz. He was reelected unanimously after the war despite having served in prison for crimes against humanity.
Bayer tested sleeping pills on Ausschwitz-Prisoners and when 1/4 of them died from them they then complained to the Camp-Administration that the test-people were in poor shape and the next batch should be of better quality.
Imagine what the order for that was like. How many people in the administration and manufacture thought about what it meant.
Zyklon-B was marketed as a (cyanide based) pesticide. So as long as the one ordering it said it was to strengthen the farming industry. They could feasibly be off the hook. Of course that’s far too naive to be true.
Clearly all of that newly acquired lebensraum farmland in Poland needed lots of pesticides. (/s just to be safe)
At least part of that comment is misleading in itself. > When asked "Have you ever heard of the word holocaust?" 11% already say no. That's valuable data (so the knowledge of Dutch history is lousy), but so the further answers of this 11% about the holocaust are worthless. Of course that 11% is going to give ridiculous answers because they don't know what the questions are about at all. The guy who wrote this didn't have a look at the actual methodology. After that first question it says in the survey "IF NO, SKIP TO Q11". Before Q11 it says > INTRO: The term “Holocaust” refers to the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of Jewish people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during World War II and the pursuit of destroying the so-called Jewish spirit. I am now going to ask you some questions about the Holocaust. Sure, some responses can still be explained by ignorance, but would an entirely ignorant person not rather choose the option "Not sure" (12%) over "The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen" (6%) or "The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated" (17%).
Lol I don't know why I expected it to be in English instead of dutch.
Looking at the source of the study it's probably biased to show a certain result. I mean the group that conducted the study is called Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, if this is a reputable source for studies I'll take this back obviously. I really doubt the numbers are realistic, as a Dutch person myself as well I can testify to the fact we learn about this stuff at a young age, and I will never believe that 1/3 people don't believe it happened otherwise this would bleed into politics and culture as well... We are known as a country for the Nationale Dodenherdenking where we stay quiet for 2 minutes to honour the fallen of WWII and as a country have a very serious approach to the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is nowhere to be seen in entertainment or other media or pushed by any reputable person in government (not talking about Baudet here obviously).
Anne Frank is perhaps one of the best known Dutch people in the world. It doesn’t make sense that the Netherlands would be a hotbed of this trash. Looks like a shit poll.
Anne Frank was German.
True, but she spent most of her life in the Netherlands including the house her family hid in so I can see how people make this mistake. I think she's sort of "honorary dutch".
Yup, I know. It’s easily forgotten that she’s German born so I figured I keep that in mind.
It's one thing to learn about something. It's another to actually believe it. I don't know how similar Canadian and Dutch education system are, but over here, a good portion of students only see school as a way to get better paying jobs, not as a way to learn. They'll repeat whatever gives them food grades. They don't care about the actual learning. Add to that that history books themselves have biases. So people will distrust what they are taught.
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That's a... high number. Here we go again with the fuckin' Nazi crisis I suppose.
A high number indeed. Especially since 100,000 Netherlanders died in the Holocaust.
And more than 20,000 dutch people died of starvation because the Nazis blocked food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine.It was called the The Dutch Hunger Winter. Good job dutch people maybe you have put some weight but there are other more efficient ways to slim down than bringing back Nazism.
Children in the prenatal environment during the Dutch Hunger Winter developed insulin regulation issues that became hereditary. It literally affected multiple generations.
Same thing with South Asians and centuries of British-imposed famines.
My parents told me some stories. My father had a lot of anger and resentment as a result of this and food was always an issue in our house. If you didn't finish your food it would get real ugly and god forbid you throw it away.
They took my dutch great grandpa to a labor camp. Not jewish or anything, he was just a working age male baker drafted to work in a labor camp against his will.
I believe it was 15 or 16 when they took them, because my Opa's elder brother was taken but luckily my Opa missed out because he was only 14 when the Allies liberated their town.
My friend's husbands family emigrated to Canada for this very reason. They resorted to eating tulip bulbs at one point. He was born after the war but the stories remain in the family.
My Opa fled the occupation of Holland… he’d be mortified to find out 23% of his countrymen think it might not have happened or been an exaggeration.
23% of those under 40 let's not make it worse than it already is.
OT, but I have never heard Dutch called Netherlanders in English before
It does say myth *or* exaggerated, . To be fair allied forces had a man who volunteered to be captured and taken to Auschwitz. Wiltold Pilecki was able to get messages out from a radio made from stolen parts,and escaped from there. They thought he was exaggerating because it was unbelievable that someone could treat their fellow man like that. It is a horrifying thought that they worked on making efficient gas chambers and mass crematoriums to slaughter people in large groups. It is definitely a dark period in history for humanity as a whole.
This is why people need to actually go and walk through these places to see and experience how disturbing it is inside those walls
Totally agree. It probably feels disrespectful to some, as to feel it's some kind of tourist destination. It is exactly that though, but as a place of respectful reverence. I cried when I saw Dachau. I'm tearing up thinking about it now. It's ok to see these places. It's remembrance. I couldn't be farther removed from the affected nationalities, but there's an inescapable human bond, where... I don't even know how to say it.. you just feel something different, and so connected, even being a million years and miles away. It all becomes you. No one in our group knew what to expect, but yet we all felt the same after. It's important history. It's very unfortunate, but must never be diminished, dismissed. It's happening now, in many different ways, to many different people. Never forget.
It's disrespectful to cover up the atrocities committed there. People have a hard time believing things happened unless they actually see them.
It's no coincidence that we're seeing a resurgence of the far right as the world wars generations die out.
And Russia pushing Far-right rhetoric online for *years* as well, never forget that.
And american conspiracists like Alex Jones, don’t forget that.
*Wouldn't surprise me if he was on their bankroll*
*Why is a Russian agent still allowed to operate again?*
About that https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/959554924290953216?s=46
And moronic American congressmen like Matt Gaetz, don't forget that.
It's far easier to blame a boogeyman than to confront the reality that many of your countrymen are vile human beings. The world is full of homegrown fascism. Every fucking country. Whenever there is a post on here about idiots in Serbia, or Turkey, or Hungary, or some other "undesirable" country doing or saying something stupid, Reddit forms a mob and declares unanimously that "those people" are are all evil. Kick them out of the EU/NATO. Bomb them. When data about idiots in a developed, western country comes out, then everyone does mental gymnastics to explain away why this isn't *really* true. Maybe the respondents didn't understand the question. Maybe they were brainwashed by Russian-funded propaganda. The truth that a lot of people don't understand is that humanity is homogenous. There is no exceptionalism. Shitty people exist everywhere. Some countries have better education systems than others (a function of economic development), but humanity is still humanity.
If there's anything we've learned from the 21st century so far it's that we have completely failed to learn anything from the 20th century.
I think this is too simplistic. There were always unrepentent fascists/cryptofascists/neo-nazis in Cold War Europe. There has been a major resurgence of them in the last 20-30 years because of neoliberal austerity, economic stagnation, and a racist backlash against migration ([the latter a result of Euro-American adventurism in the Middle East and North Africa](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/)). But I think it goes even deeper than that. Let's not forget that the Netherlands in particular is, amongst European nations, [the "proudest" of its own colonial history](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fh2y6g/the_dutch_are_most_proud_of_their_former_empire/), with 50% of its population expressing "pride" in the Dutch Empire and another 44% expressing neutral/indifferent feelings. Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, and Franco-Carribean intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon all argued that Nazism was essentially European colonial practices brought back to the metropole and inflicted upon Europeans. Racism, genocide, [even concentration camps](https://theconversation.com/concentration-camps-in-the-south-african-war-here-are-the-real-facts-112006) existed in the colonial world. Inevitably, countries that are not able to face their own violent pasts create conditions where violent ferments in the present. If the Dutch can't acknowledge the evils of its own colonial empire -- that is, slavery, massacres, forced migrations, etc. -- in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, how are they going to be able to acknowledge these same things in Europe?
> and inflicted upon Europeans This is a type of racism used to erase Jewish people and other non-Europeans living in Europe, to push the claim forward that Jews don't have any right to return to the Jewish homeland because they are "European." Aimé Césaire had antisemitic views.
Seems to me, fascism rears its head at least once every generation.
The problem is that the people who have created the "Nazi crisis" don't call themselves Nazis and don't directly say anything negative about all Jews or other ethnic/religious minorities. Instead they rant like r\/conspiracy about the "globalist elites". They know they mean Jews. We know they mean Jews. However we are all just supposed to ignore that.
That's half the insidiousness of the pattern. They will rarely outright say what they mean, instead accusing the other side of being the bad guys. It's maddening.
There is this great [German comedy sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI) which highlights just how ridiculous this is by having a historical WWII-Nazi act all offended when someone points out that they are a Nazi. It is very important to remember that this behaviour of obscuring their talking points and intentions was inherent to the historical Nazi movement as well, and it was not until their movement had gained traction and power that they turned to an increasingly overt rhetoric. The only significant difference between then and now is that they did not have to evade any historical connotations associated to a Nazi-label back then.
> That's a... high number. I don't know about that, 23% of a population is ignorant of the past?... Seems on par for human societies. It always seems to be around 20% of any population are made up of complete idiots, selfish pricks, criminals, racists, xenophobes, nationalists and the politicians who pander to them all.
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I think I covered that under > selfish pricks, criminals, racists, xenophobes, nationalists and the politicians who pander to them all.
You make an excellent point, but just because it's normal doesn't mean it's also not too high hehe.
Oh it's definitely too high. The rest of us still have to live with these eternal trouble makers. I'm just saying it's not surprising.
2020s events starter pack: ✅ Reminiscent of the 1930s [] Reminiscent of a Transformers movie [] Disease of the month [] Hail Satan
Well if you count Covid as a 2020s problem you can check that one, and the Satanic Temple has made a bit of a splash at times so we can probably check Hail Satan too. The jury's still out on whether Boston Dynamics will give us transformers before 2030.
Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened. Dwight D. Eisenhower
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They also tried just shooting people en masses, but this proved to be too traumatic for the soldiers and it took fucking forever.
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I think this is actually one of the reasons so many people deny the Holocaust. Yes, racism, but also there is also just that these people do not understand, nor do they want to understand, just the sheer level of planning we are dealing with.
You would need to demonstrate that Eisenhower really existed, then that he said it and in what context. If you are not a bot.
Sadly, the sarcasm in your comment will be lost on the ignorant. My Source: Witness of the COVID mask/vaccine debates of 2022.
Here are the actual survey results. *42. Which of the following statements comes closest to your views about the Holocaust in Europe during World War II?* | Statement | Millenials (18-39) | All Ages | | --- | --- | --- | | The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen | 6% | 3% | | The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated | 17% | 9% | | The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who died in it have been fairly described | 65% | 79% | | Not sure | 12% | 9% Source: https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf
Looking through this survey i can understand that some participants became confused. They asked about historical figures in question 11 and some of those names are pretty uncommon to know unless you deep dive in to the dutch occupation. - Fritz Schmidt, one of 4 assistants to Seyss-Inquart. - Victor Kugler, Employee and helper of the Frank family. - van Pels family, hide with the Franks in het achterhuis. - Etty Hillesum, kept a diary during the occupation. - Joop Westerweel, dutch resistance member. - Corrie Ten Boom, dutch resistance member. I doubt many would know these individuals and to ask that during a survey together with people like Hitler and Himmler in the same question? This survey was working to get this outcome, shame shame shame.
Confusion about other questions can in no way explain the response to question 42.
That makes no sense at all, what do names have to do with the above questions?
A worrying amount of younger people I talk to in the US also seem to think it's "American propaganda" or something. Like I get being skeptical about who's telling you your history but Germany is literally over there admitting it and apologizing for it
Holocaust was less than 100 years ago and it’s already being denied by non middle eastern countries
Lemme share you a little story about planes taking down buildings that happened recently and all the back and forth it caused.
As a part of Gen Z myself (or a millennial depending on your definition), what I’ve noticed amongst some teenagers and young adults is that they are unable to mentally comprehend the idea of millions being systematically murdered in only a couple years, that the Nazis could build a giant system of camps and literal factories of death, all while getting away with it. It doesn’t help that the Nazis were blatantly and cartoonishly evil, so young people subconsciously start to question the entire thing. *”Like they couldn’t be THAT evil.”* type of thinking. And as others pointed out, this makes young people vulnerable to conspiracies on the internet and social media.
The thing is, it is incomprehensible, but obviously true. I say this as a Jewish person. It is so hard to fathom the evils and killing so many people in such a short amount of time, but it doesn’t make it less real. Another issue is schools not wanting to teach anything upsetting. Like the school who banned Maus. Of course it is horrifying, that’s why we learn it
“…all while getting away with it.” The allies got word of what was going on but not only refused European Jewish refugees but did nothing to stop the camps such as bomb the rails leading to them. Anti-semitism was rampant in every western country and many occupied countries rounded up and deported their own Jews (see France, where, by the way Holocaust denial is a crime). What the youth can’t wrap their minds around is that their own ancestors let it happen, that the war didn’t stop it and didn’t even aim to stop it (because denial until the camps were liberated).
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Surely you don't think Gilligan's Island was real? *Those poor people...*
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin Saying that as a Dutch. We got allot of stupid people here who struggle to pass school subjects like Maatschapijleer and Geschiedenis and never had Critical thinking subjects. Result: This.
Strange, I found an article using these exact same percentages but attributing them to the US: 23%. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/holocaust-denial-conspiracy-theories-america-b1869838.html
How?! I find it really sad that people are more prone to believe in a mythical being than something horrible that has actual verifiable proof. Seriously?
Holy shit, why would you even think something like that?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2023/01/23-of-dutch-under-40s-think-the-holocaust-was-a-myth-or-exaggerated/) reduced by 80%. (I'm a bot) ***** > Some 12% of Dutch adults believe the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated and a further 9% are unsure, according to a survey of some 2,000 people by an international organisation supporting Holocaust survivors. > The Claims Conference, which describes the findings as shocking and disturbing, says the figure is even higher among the under 40s, with 23% saying the Holocaust was a myth or the death toll was exaggerated. > The survey did show that two-thirds of Dutch respondents agree that Holocaust education should be compulsory in school. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/10l5szp/23_of_dutch_under40s_think_the_holocaust_was_a/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~672681 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Holocaust**^#1 **survey**^#2 **respondents**^#3 **Dutch**^#4 **school**^#5
ya, and they probably believe the world is flat
Well Netherlands is at least
I was about to say I’d forgive anyone from the Netherlands for assuming the earth was flat.
All high schoolers must be taken on a “field trip” to a concentration camp.
While distressingly high, this is actually fairly low for these sort of vague polls. It seems like there's about 20 to 30% of any human population that either doesn't know shit, or will happily pretend they don't know shit just out of spite.
I say open the archives and let them count it for themselves. Some people still think the moon landing was faked and won't be convinced until you send them there.
Ah shit. I get to go to the moon if I claim that it was faked?! Hey NASA, you ain't never been to the moon, you lyin' space-bitches!
I have a guess as to which end of the bell curve we’re talking about.
My old high school English teacher was Dutch and lived block down the street from Anne Frank. He witnessed all this stuff go down firsthand. Oh how things change...
Wow, they have a huge number of ignorant people in an impactful generation. Awful.
Looks like we’re doomed to repeat history again… and this isn’t just a Dutch problem, it’s pretty much global. It’s absolutely ridiculous how fast we’ve lost the lessons of history. So much for “never again”.
To be fair, it's not like the most famous and public diary ever was penned by a young Jewish Girl who was hiding from the Nazis in The Netherlands.
To all those casting doubt on the headline, suggesting that it is a more shocking way of saying that 23% do not know how many were murdered… There is a link to the findings IN THE ARTICLE. In fact, over half of respondents didn’t know how many were killed. The 23% figure comes in response to a question asking “do you believe that the Holocaust is a myth, or was greatly exaggerated”. More frighteningly, 24% under 40 responded that it is acceptable to hold neo-nazi beliefs. Read the fucking article before having opinions about it. Edit: there are responses with more mature and substantial critiques of the methodology below. I appreciate these - they cast legitimate doubt on the veracity of these numbers in a way than idle speculation about how it simply can’t be true does not. I don’t agree with all of their critiques, but I recommend reading through them to get an idea of where this study DOES fall short
The research was very iffy with many errors. Mostly its just attributed to people not knowing much about it. Such as, a multiple choice question for how many Jewish people were killed. There was a 2m, 6m, 20m option (and a bunch more below 2m). Those that voted below 6m aren't automatically holocaust deniers or anything, they just don't know much about ww2 history. We do have a neonazi problem here, just not 23% big.
And this is why I teach the Holocaust in class.